AI tools’ near future
The doom and gloom around non-designers using AI tools to replace designers is increasing. I don’t doubt this is a trend, but I suspect that it won’t lead to...
Posts by Year
2024
Research both known unknowns and unknown unknows
Greg Bernstein in Making research more durable:
Design with restraint
Christopher K Wong in Why you shouldn’t be too eager to share your work:
Designing towards hurdles
A key idea in product design is to make things easier and simpler as much as possible so people are faster at whatever they are doing, with the assumption th...
e46 Personas are meant to be used, not just created
Personas are a widely used method, as they are seemingly easy to create and fit well into the image of a standardized design process. But as with any other t...
e45 Better presentations with the pyramid principle
If the goal of a presentation is to influence stakeholder decisions, the pyramid principle provides a simple framework to create decks that have flexible dep...
e44 Nonviolent communication for designers
As designers become more seniors, there is a common expectation of also becoming better at communication. It’s often unclear what’s it that actually needs to...
Generative AI’s automation trap
A constant thing with creating new software seems the tendency to automate things people can do easily while leaving the more complicated stuff for people to...
e43 The team’s common rituals build the team
When a design team is formed from individual designers, it needs to have certain rituals in place to grow into an actual team. Besides the usual suspects of ...
e42 Facilitating participatory design
Designers might describe what they do as designing, but more often than not, it’s more facilitating. The modern design process calls for participation not on...
e41 Articulating the design team’s value
Some design teams have a vague understanding of how they contribute to their organization beyond the daily tasks of producing UIs. However, the value the tea...
e40 Prototypes model experiences
Since we design interactive systems, prototypes are the most important artifacts we can produce in our work. Prototypes expand what we can create, model the ...
Switching from Evernote to Joplin
I’ve been an Evernote user for more than 10 years, but finally decided to switch away from it. I started to use Joplin, an open-source note-taking app a coup...
2023
e39 2023 Retrospect
2023 is drawing to an end, which is a good time to take a pause, reflect a bit on the year, and chart a path for the coming year.
e38 Maturity models help formulate what good looks like
Design maturity models help get a holistic understanding of where the design team is and should go, but they are also often distracting by being overly gener...
e37 Nurturing designer and researcher careers
Effective nurturing of designers and researchers is not only crucial for their career development but also essential for building a high-impact design organi...
UX & PM: A Strategic Duo part 2
This is the second post in a series that Greg and I are publishing on the strategic role of UX in product development and how PMs and UX professionals can de...
e36 Design team structures - defining how we work
Defining a team structure with intention helps design leaders achieve their goals, scale their teams, and create great designs. Key factors to consider are t...
e35 Develop your leadership style
Design leadership style is a powerful determinant of a design team’s effectiveness. By understanding and articulating your style, you can be a more intention...
e34 Wartime - peacetime design leadership
Product design and research leaders are facing a shift from peacetime to wartime conditions. With shifting priorities, layoffs, budget cuts, and higher deman...
e33 Activating insights for the design process
Evidence-based design serves the users truly, and actively using user research insights provides the evidence. Use workshops and other collaborative tools to...
Anatomy of a UX strategy
Senior designers and even design leaders are often asked to go more strategic. Makes sense, that’s what more experienced people do to increase their impact a...
e32 Rigor is essential in user research
Rigor is a key ingredient in any successful user research project. But what does rigor mean, exactly? And how can you ensure that your research is rigorous?
e31 Why writing matters for designers
Writing is a valuable skill for product designers, especially in distributed teams. Besides its inherent use for async communication, it’s a valuable tool fo...
e30 Raising the team’s empathy
Empathy is a key skill for designers and design teams. The ability to understand another person not only helps in creating better products but also in establ...
e29 Managing designers and managing researchers
Product designers and UX researchers have different mindsets, skills, and communication styles. Managing these two roles requires an understanding of both ro...
e28 Desire paths - following the users’ tracks
Desire paths, and shortcuts people make in physical spaces are also relevant to UX design. Users always find clever ways to use software that suits them bett...
Yet another post on designer job titles
Digital design is still in its storming phase, that’s why we have so many posts, debates, and comments on naming, terminology, etc. Part of it is philosophic...
e27 Onboarding designers
Onboarding new design team members in a good way is essential for their success and the overall productivity of the team. Planning this right fosters a suppo...
e26 Product trios for designers
Product trios is a great team setup to do product discovery, yet working in this type of close collaboration is not for everyone. Designers need to be prepar...
e25 Writing useful hypotheses
Writing useful hypotheses in the product design process helps understand user and business problems better while fostering critical thinking about the produc...
e24 Problem space, solution space
Understanding the concepts of problem space and solution space is crucial for achieving exceptional product outcomes. While these two realms are intricately ...
e23 Celebrating successes is a team effort
In the fast-paced world of product design, celebrating successes often takes a backseat to chase the next goal. But failing to acknowledge achievements toget...
e22 UX strategy - the design team’s guide to success
Having a clear strategy is what sets apart mediocre design teams and good teams. A clear strategy is crucial for design teams to have a clear vision and dire...
e21 1-on-1s - strengthening the team with coaching
1-on-1s can be a real game-changer when it comes to building a design team that works like a well-oiled machine. Managers can improve their team’s skills, ca...
e20 Designing meaningful products with AI
AI has become a buzzword in tech, but simply adding it to a product does not guarantee value. Designers need to have an understanding of the underlying techn...
e19 Design audits - improving collaboration, quality, and alignment
Design audits are an often overlooked but valuable tool for designers and design leaders to get valuable insights and energy for change.
e18 Sustainability for product design teams
Product designers should think about including more sustainable practices in their work. They should consider carbon consumption, influencing business models...
e17 Career ladders chart a path for the team’s growth
A clear career ladder is vital to retain team members and ensure they are growing in their roles. They provide clarity not only for professional development ...
e16 Getting deeper with well-formed user interview questions
User interviews are one of the easiest user research methods to get started with. To make them effective, the flow and formulation of questions need to be ri...
e15 Pair design leads to better design collaboration
Pair design is an awesome way to get designers to collaborate more closely, increase design quality, and for team members to learn and grow together.
e14 Building great design teams with a purposeful hiring process
Great teams are not born overnight - they are forged through a purposeful hiring process. At its core, hiring is not just about filling roles; it’s about fin...
e12 Articulating design decisions makes design work transparent
Well-articulated design decisions are often the single most impactful improvement design teams can do. It helps in transparency, more confident design choice...
e11 Design intent clarifies what a design aims to achieve
Without a solid intention, a designed solution will have unclear decisions, shallow exploration, and mediocre quality. Describing the shared design intent gi...
e10 Design principles set the foundation for good design
Design principles set the foundation for consistently articulating design choices and prioritizing trade-offs across the design team and the wider organizati...
Design critique - classifying insights
On design critiques all feedback might be treated as equal, but that’s of course not the case, some points are more important. When doing round-robin, feedba...
e09 What is good design
Design teams and leaders need to define what good design looks like within their context to be able to push for better outcomes.
e08 Writing experience stories for better portfolios
Storytelling is a key skill for designers, and it can be also used to understand what we learned and to create better portfolios - by telling stories about o...
2022
e07 Player-coach leaders
Player-coach roles in design teams are getting more common again but come with tradeoffs for both design leaders and their teams. Leaders need to balance the...
e06 Delight is great UX
Well-polished details on their own are not enough for delight, the users’ goals need to be met exceptionally too.
e05 Teams of T-shaped designers
Product design teams are more effective and produce higher quality output if they have deep expertise in each design discipline, while they also need general...
Discovery differs from delivery
Discovery and delivery are not just different phases in the product design process, they also differ from each other in significant ways in terms of what the...
e04 Writing great job ads
The hiring process needs to be a designed experience, and job ads are the first touchpoints for potential candidates. A great job ad should be human-centered...
e03 Structuring research notes
Taking notes on user research sessions should go beyond asking observers to write down everything they see. Structuring notes drive impact beyond a single se...
e02 Brag doc - Keeping track of wins
Brag doc, a running list of what has gone well, is a great practice for designers to reflect and keep track of learnings and wins. It also helps managers to ...
e01 Design critique - a core practice for design teams
Design critique is not only a basic method for designers to get feedback and improve the quality of their work, but also a core practice for design teams to ...
Newsletter on Design Leadership
I’m starting a (bi)weekly newsletter on design leadership called 9am26. Looking around the interwebs these days there are more and more good articles on lead...
Welcome to 9am26
I’m glad you’ve subscribed to my newsletter on design leadership! I hope you find something worthwhile in each issue that helps you in your daily practice.
UX Coffee Hours FAQ
I’ve been part of the UX Coffee Hours for the past 1.5 years, meeting UX researchers every week for a chat, mostly mentoring people starting out in their car...
2021
Design innovation
There are multiple types of innovation, technology is one of these, another one is design. Design innovation can relate to many areas of a product, even up t...
Staff designers
A few notes from the Staff design, interviews with high level individual contributor designers by Brian Lovin.
UX strategy
Two chief direction for UX strategy (correlates with the two roles for design leaders, leadership and management):
Opportunity solution trees
Theresa Torres describes Opportunity solution trees as a visual way to think about working towards an outcome throughout a discovery process.
Hypothesis
Tal Raviv’s article, That’s Not a Hypothesis describes what hypothesis is in the scientific method: something we believe in, a part of the model what we beli...
Strategic vs tactical research
User research projects vary in scope, where they are on the scale depends on the goal.
My knowledge workflow 2021
This is my current knowledge workflow as of beginning of 2021. I write these both to document my current practice, and also to clearly set what guidelines I’...
Experience stories
Collecting pieces
Personas are for aggregation or for alignment
Had a chat with a researcher this week, and one of the topics we discussed was how to use personas in a design process. We ended up talking a lot on why thei...
Design is business
Was on a meetup today, and one of the questions asked from the presenter was “What’s the relationship between business and design at your company”. Ofcourse ...
Setting design OKRs
OKRs (for example from Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is a good book about it) or similar goal setting techniques usually work well for focusing product t...
Design leader activities
Two useful frameworks for design leaders to describe their activities:
2020
#stretchcon 2020 impressions
Last week I attended the Strech conference 2020 online. I found over the years that the individual talks themselves don’t give that much useful insights, but...
First three months
To get started as a design leader at a new role a few things to look out for.
Types of vision
I found the term vision a bit confusing when thinking on their role on product development. Possibly since different people understand different things when ...
Designing the Growth Path for UX Leaders and UX Managers
My notes from Jared Spool’s talk “Designing the Growth Path for UX Leaders and UX Managers”.
Garden
Garden seems to be an emerging trend in thinking, doing knowledge work. It’s an approach that is described by multiple methodologies or frameworks and all of...
Planning design activities
Setting goals
1on1s
Initial talk
Accessibility
Being accessible is not only a good practice for legal reasons (to avoid getting sued, like the Dominos case, it’s also the right thing to do (being more inc...
Personas
About personas
Design Principles
Formulating design principles
2018
Plan to learn — on well designed research plans
Well designed research plans in qualitative user research help to successfully learn about users
2017
Designing AI products
This story is based on the talk I recently gave on the UX Budapest Meetup featuring AI topics. Here is my prezi from the event. I’ve added more links and mor...
Making sure your UX home assignment hits the mark
We assess UX designers’ and researchers’ professional skills with a homework during our hiring process. While we set up our interviews to get a nice picture ...
Tipping is sexy
Showing tip amount examples guides how much tip people give
2016
The 4x4 Mini-Design Brief
A quick method to build a creative brief for small projects
Why Doing Design Research is Imperative
I was teaching designers this week, and it struck me: people don’t question the need of doing research any more. There used to be a few confident, experience...
UX Quotes to the Rescue
I seem to followed by quotes on all things UX. They appear in presentations, on Facebook conversations as funny come backs, in discussions about UIs. I get i...
Designing for Mobile Engagement
Enhancing apps with messaging
Design Camp Adventures
Things learned at the IxD ’16 Camp
Drawing Houses
User Story Mapping at Emarsys
Clashing Design Principles to Annoy You
From time to time I find myself obsessed with broken things, especially physical objects. The ones that leave me in an interrupted, annoyed, confused state w...
How Might We — Hogyan tudhatnánk
(This post is about how to apply the How Might We method in Hungarian, and in a broader sense how language based design methods translate.)
From design to product design
This week I attended a UX Budapest meetup event. Besides the always great networking I liked the talks too, as they offered an interesting insight on how peo...
#watchlearn Designing How We Design — Kim Goodwin
#watchlearn is series of sessions of the Emarsys UX team watching a talk, discussing it, and publishing their notes about it.
About Ford’s faster horses
There is an often told quote attributed to Henry Ford, in product development:
2015
#stretchcon 2015 impressions
I frequently see UX people in a leadership role, even if they are not team leads or managers. They still need to guide their teams or even to change processe...